Carefully beanied, without sunglasses, she managed to spend the morning at the hospital, between the gift shop, the main lobby, and the gloomy cafeteria, where she ate a cup of minestrone, a ham and Swiss on rye, and a rice pudding—her first real meal since leaving home. The food was cheap, for which she was grateful, and the rice pudding—Kozy Shack—pleasingly familiar. She made a constant effort to look like she knew what she was doing—as un-waiflike as possible—and she got so caught up in acting her role that, she told Peter, who told me, she could picture her nonexistent grandfather, lying upstairs in one of those complicated beds, head up, knees up just a little, draped in a sheet and a blue-speckled hospital gown, bony arms punctured by tubes, hooked up to blinking machines, his sparse white hair askew and his eyes half-closed. She pictured his face, its jaundiced, freckled parchment, and his irritating way of clearing his throat every minute or two. She pictured a real guy, a composite of some of the old guys she’d seen that very morning, and she so convinced herself that he was real she could feel tears behind her eyes at the thought of his imminent death. She was ready, if anybody at the hospital should ask her, to describe this grandfather in great detail, and to hurry back to him—her only doubt, having studied the directory in the entrance, was whether he’d be in Geriatrics on Three West or Oncology on Five East. But in her hours in the hospital, nobody at all seemed to notice her; certainly nobody addressed her; as though she flitted through invisible, a familiar.
Only now, frighteningly, did she wonder whether her grandfather really didn’t exist, whether he’d died long ago the way Bev had always said, or whether, like her father, he’d been killed off by Bev’s fictions and actually in this life went mournfully about his days somewhere, maybe even in Bangor, Maine, wondering what had happened to his daughter, and whether he might, in this world, have a grandchild he could love. You have to imagine how absolutely Cassie’s faith was shaken, and this before she went to knock on the front door of the Burnes house. Reality had become slippery. Facts she thought she’d always known disintegrated, or appeared to. She didn’t any longer trust in anything she’d believed to be true; but she was also aware that she might be wrong, that maybe Bev had never lied to her, that her beloved father had in fact died on the highway outside Boston that long-ago night.
Cassie hated Anders Shute and wished powerfully that he had no part in her life. Her mother, in whom she’d long placed her love and sense of safety and of self, loved this man Cassie despised, and seemed prepared to sacrifice her own daughter, her only daughter, for that love. What should Cassie have believed? It was better to think that her mother was crazy, a compulsive liar with terrible judgment, than to believe her mother had dropped Cassie with cause, and had some real reason for her choices. In either case, Cassie was on her own; but in the former, at least, she had hope—for a father, for grandparents, for any of a number of alternative lives, none of which could be worse, she figured, than the one she was living.
Sunday afternoon in Bangor was trickier. She couldn’t wander all day through the hospital corridors without attracting suspicion; it wasn’t big enough. She figured rightly that the public library would be closed on a Sunday, but she walked there anyway, up from the riverbank to the flat open plaza on Harlow Street. It was hard to blend into the background on a Sunday, she told Peter—not as hard as it would have been in Royston, where everybody really knows everybody, at least by sight—but she still stuck out more than she liked. She felt people were watching her, and once the sun came out and it grew warm, she worried that the beanie over her hair made her particularly noticeable. But the hair—her famous white-blond hair—would have been worse. She kept expecting someone to ask her questions—the blue-rinsed grandma limping out of Rite Aid clutching a prescription bag who glared at her; the little Asian boy who banged his scooter pretty hard into her heel because he wasn’t looking; the guy who reminded her of Peter, the same dark curls and gangly arms, about our age, hunched on the library steps tapping on his phone. That was the worst, because she actually wanted his attention, because she was looking at him easily as much as he looked at her, flickering, surreptitious glances unlike the others, a kind of flirting. But he didn’t speak, and she didn’t either, in the end a good thing, really, if she didn’t want to get caught; and she drifted away as breezily as she could to the nearby park, where she sat cross-legged at the foot of a maple, freezing her butt on the cold ground, pretending she was waiting for someone—which, of course, she sort of was. She said to Peter, who repeated it to me, that it was only there—in the park, the prickly packed earth under her and the maple’s scaly trunk behind her, its limbs above still winter-bare—that she understood she was a runaway, that she’d put herself in the category of news flashes or Amber Alerts, a minor who wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
The craziness of it all dawned on her: why did Anders Shute have any say at all in her fate? How could that be possible? What would it mean to go home, if she ended up going home, or if that was even the right word, by now, for the storybook house in the cul-de-sac with the Encroaching Forest advancing behind it? Where would she ever be at home now, she wondered, and, she told Peter, sitting in that little park she was weighed, as if by a lead mantle, with a great sadness; she could feel her shoulders and her spine collapsing, and even her cheeks grew heavy—the very opposite of the joy she’d experienced that morning under the cherry blossoms. Because it suddenly seemed to her that coming to Bangor had been a terrible, terrible mistake, and that whatever she would find out from Arthur Clarke Burnes, there’d be no coming back from it, no way to unknow it and either she’d be stuck with Bev and Anders with no way out or she’d have lost Bev forever by exposing her as a lifelong liar, and really, honestly, what she wanted was to be able to go back in time, not a long way, just a couple of years, back to the summer before seventh grade, before it all went wrong. To a time of unknowing. (And when Peter told me she’d said that, I was sure that even though she was talking about how things were with Bev, with her mom, that she also meant going back to me, that she wished too that we could have us back, that the knot had never been untied.)
When Peter told me this, all that Cassie had said to him that Wednesday afternoon and evening in his bedroom, hidden from his parents and from hers, before she vanished again and none of us knew where, I wanted desperately to believe that I could do something, that I could help to find her, of course, but also that it would matter to her, matter hugely even, that I did, that it was me. Of course, it was her story, what went on up there in Maine, of course it was; it didn’t happen to me, even if I feel, now, as though I were there. But if I’m honest, what mattered most to me was how those events affected our story, hers and mine. I wanted her to come back to me. When Peter told me all she’d said, we were in limbo, caught between inhaling and exhaling, and when I tell you what mattered most to me, I’m telling a terrible secret, because all that mattered then to anyone else was simply that we find her.